But Papa, how did the Universe come about?  How did life come about?  How did the stuff we stand on, the stuff we breath, the depth we see...  All of it, why?

And I was tired, and had long lived to sort of stoically hide my emotions.  Even as I trust them, even as I feel quite obliged--and, really, happy in a way--to follow them, to explore them, to live the heights and depths, and all the things that catch you and come upon you in the middle of the night, when you suddenly awake, in the middle of things, heart pounding sometimes...

And really, I was in one of those very dreary weary moods...

Well, it's all because of kindness.  Kindness is the feeling, that's when you're with... you know, the whole thing.  The Big Bang is the kindness, like all the good works that people do, how much they care, how much they want good for the world...

It was this explosion of kindness, really.  Out of nothing, boom, everything, and it's a big everything, full of the most minute details, the biggest range, from sand grain to pebble, to river stone, to mountain, to space, the kind we live in and move about in...

And kindness is the living force that remains, or, rather maybe, had something to do with it all.  The kindness and love we feel for things is the same as the winds that were blowing when the whole tiniest of tiny things went BOOM.

Kindness is expansive, isn't it?  It's capable of everything.  It always has room for more, energy for more.


I think that's how my little sermon worked that night.

That night, I'd felt it, atop all the frustrations of work, how the restaurant somehow hangs together, somehow lives... Really the greatest of mysteries...  I mean, look at the world.  Look at how selfish and despots take things of people being together in some strange and seemingly haphazard ways...  The whole thing could go to falling apart and bitter acrimony quite quickly, under the strain.  You'd want to scream and shout at your coworker sometimes trying to make it all happen, but, you see the customers, like at a wedding, all pretty, nice young men and women, and you just want to do the best for them.

This is the awful great physical miracle of the Wedding at Cana, the first one.  (I tried not to choke up...)   Dostoevsky has digested it for human consumption, the poor bastard.  (And I'm keeping some of these thoughts to myself, and not sure exactly what I'm sharing, what I'm keeping hidden...)  God wants joy, human happiness, Dostoevsky gives us.  God wants people to be happy.  Thus, the wine.  And they were poor people, here, and they love wine, because it's one of their few real happy things.  God loves people.  Kindness is flowing throughout.  Maybe that speaks of the nature of all miracles themselves, the impossible kindness...

I'd been so exhausted, the whole thing of having your gas pedal pushed down by other people, other things.  I'd been willing to do it all, because of kindness and wine, human happiness, joy, my own small spectator part of it...

Well, actually, I was a scientist, living in my great scientific clutter, all the people coming and going, the thousand million bits of conversations in my scientific life as a barman putting up with it all... riding the bucking bronco.

In the end you only say a little bit to a child.  I'm both sure and not sure what I spoke to her about it all.   But I think, I hope, I got my point across, both to myself as much as she.  That strong flowing wicked wind we must ride upon, that flows through our chests and our stomachs and in all the hollow spaces of our bodies, through the tops of our hands as well as the cups of our palms, through the tops of our feet as well as the part of us which, like the animal, touches the ground, balancing us, touching the earth.

And when you have deep truth to tell a child, you wonder, you know, why this sudden burst of understanding which I am allowed....

And you, I, we, all of us bear scars about this, the times we betray our own little minerals of understandings about the whole thing, by which I mean everything.  The time we spoke up to someone else, hopefully, hopefully spoke, and we said, or hope we said, well, this is what I did, because what's it about anyway...

And whenever the truth sort of bursts through us like light, light we are somewhat obliged to make look like normal conversation, not to scare anyone, not to bring up other little truths, like, oh, we all are dying too, which you might not want to do, like, on vacation...

We all have moments when we, all our wisdom, gets overlooked, or...  missed, or even disrespected... There you are, having gone on the big family vacation, and you are looking up at the Milky Way there above the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, less light to pollute this the best part of being on vacation here, where you can really see, like, the scale of things.  "The stars...  we are the consciousness of the Universe looking back at itself..."  And I'd even read as much, a nice little book, so I felt some sort of footnoteable confidence, and it wasn't even a weird thing to say...  But you know the response...  We've all heard it.  The damp towel.  Don't be an asshole...

But you and I, and poor Fredo Corleone even, we can grow a little understanding of all the amazing things blowing within us.


Sometimes I wasn't so happy doing my primate work at the bar.  It was too much work.  Physically grinding.  But there was Stephen Hawking with his ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, beating him down, and he was a chap and put up with it.  It was my anthropological library, my body of memory, my field of study.   But it was hard.  And I knew I had lots of wise things to tell children, just not sure how much it would do for them, just that it was truth, the truth, and the truth, as they have always said, from the Big Bang onward, the truth will set you free.


Is it sad to know all these things?  Well, it's just kindness.  Kindness lives in acts, in frog's eyes, in birds...